Los adverbios ingleses certainly, naturally y surely, y su traducción al español

Abstract

This article concentrates on three English adverbs of certainty, certainly, naturally and surely, and their correspondences in translations into Spanish. The article starts with some preliminary considerations on adverbs of certainty and on the frequency of the three adverbs mentioned above and the Spanish cognates ciertamente, naturalmente y seguramente. Next, the three English adverbs will be analyzed in terms of semantic and pragmatic features as well as their occurrences in three contemporary novels originally written in English and their correspondences in the Spanish translations. The results attest the low degree of correspondence between the English adverbs and their Spanish cognates, as well as the influence of contextual factors in the choice of expressions for the translation of each adverb, and some peculiarities of each translation.